Comments

Has it occurred to you that I may have found your objection feeble and unpersuasive, continued to believe the proposition you objected to and therefore persisted in the claim in bona fide?

No, but now that you mention it, perhaps you are simply intellectually incompetent in just the right way to make it look like a pattern of deliberate mendacity. I may have been grievously mistaken all along!

What I said was that I have not rejected it in favour of an unsupported outlier value.

Firstly, the likelihood you place on the range you specified constitutes a rejection of the consensus position. I think we’re all in agreement with that. Even the 1.5C value itself is an outlier in the consensus position, an outlier so extreme that values below it are considered to be ruled out with very high confidence – and your comment was about “less than 1.5C” which is still more extreme.

“Supported” in science does not generally mean “there’s a paper that claims it”; it means that it’s a defensible inference from ALL the evidence. Your claim – the ECS range you cited and the weight you place on it – is indeed an unsupported outlier value in the light of ALL the evidence. The fact that you refuse to cite supporting evidence makes it even more ironic that you claim your position is not “unsupported”.

BBD says the argument for his estimate is “exhaustively documented in the literature”, which any philosophy student with basic English parsing skills could tell you is a very different claim to “is the best inference from all the evidence”, which makes one wonder why BBD specified the former concept and not the latter. There are any number of scientific propositions that are exhaustively documented in the literature – along with their complete and utter rebuttal, the validity of which almost no-one now denies.

This is very similar to BBD’s hero Fabius Maximus’ M.O. which attempts to avoid any defence of one’s asserted position by simply refusing to demonstrate that one’s position is the best inference from all the data (and in part by ignoring the confidence levels in various propositions put forth by others).

“There are any number of scientific propositions that are exhaustively documented in the literature – along with their complete and utter rebuttal, the validity of which almost no-one now denies.”

Goodo. Seeing as this argument is now presented in the discussion of the range for ECS, we now presume that there is a “complete and utter rebuttal” of the 2.5 to 3C calculation available in the scientific literature.

There goes another irony meter. Brad tries to lecture other people about taking context into consideration – right after misinterpreting a quote scientist by refusing to apply context!

And Brad, I already did so.

Your comments were in the context of alleging that you weren’t lining up behind an unsupported outlier. And your lame attempt to “FTFY” by replacing “Brad” with “BBD” misses the mark because of context. BBD wasn’t lining up behind a position that it as unsupported outlier, nor has the position he cited been completely rebutted – unless you want to allege those things thereby pushing the envelope of denialism into the realm of complete farce?

‘Chebbie’ came from ‘Debbie’ at Jo Nova’s being coincidentally the only other person in the entire universe who happens to believe that Flannery said snow would be a ‘fleeting fancy’ by 2012. She denies they’re the same person. I couldn’t be bothered checking.

Well done on working out the ‘Ch’ bit. Next you’ll be telling me you figured out why I referred to latimer as ‘Larch’.

Hitchens was a war criminal and an anti-religious bigot, so your sarcasm is wasted.

And since it goes to Brad’s lack of critical thinking ability and/or lack of honesty…Brad is repeating the claim that Mann’s algorithm was “kept secret” based on allowing Brad’s personal interpretation of an alleged quote in the WSJ to outweigh the plain evidence of the algorithm being published in the MBH98 paper itself, it is worth also noting that I have pointed out previously to Brad that (ignoring the paper) even the quote is suspect, as Mann writes in his book:

Regalado also gave readers the false impression that my coauthors and I had something to hide. He quoted me as saying “Giving them [McIntyre and McKitrick] the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in.” I doubt I said that to Regalado since the algorithm was published in our original (MBH98) article, and thus there would be no need to give it to someone. I might have said that regarding the source code…and for good reasons: (1) our source code wasn’t necessary to reproduce and verify our findings. Scientists such as Eduardo Zorita…had independently implemented our algorithm without access to our source code. …

The most likely explanation is that the journalist – who Mann details making several other misleading statements, even after having interviewed Mann and other scientists – confused “source code” with “algorithm”. Heck, even McIntyre himself, a key player in the events in question, when writing in this articlequietly corrects Mann’s quote when he quotes from the WSJ!

Dr. Mann refuses to release [the source code]. “Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in,” he says.

Not only does Brad foolishly rely on a quote in a newspaper article to tell him what is found (or not found) in a freely obtainable paper, but the guy the quote refers to rejects the specific word in the quote that Brad relies upon.

Once you’ve absorbed that calamity of error on Brad’s part, read the whole page of Mann’s book at the first link – and the surrounding pages that are available for context! – and note how they contradict not just this but a number of other claims that Brad makes about Mann and his group’s work. For example, not only is the algorithm that Brad alleges was kept secret evident in the paper itself, but other researchers were able to implement it without having the source code! How could that possibly be true, if the algorithm were kept secret – or if “the source code specifies the algorithm”?!

And yet Brad continues to make these allegations. Based on past performance – and having been informed of these issues previously – he is very unlikely to acknowledge any errors, not even when McIntyre himself corrects them, and will simply Gish Gallop to his next sophistical gambit. We must also conclude that Brad is incompetent – or a crank and a liar, or perhaps all three.

So I reiterate the request for citations either supporting an ECS or 1.5 C or less over and above all of the counter-evidence, or comprehensively rebutting an ECS most likely to fall in the range of about 2.5 – 3.0 C, but based on Brad’s demonstrated inability to argue in good faith and his ability to parse the completely unexpected from English text if it “benefits” his position, I expect nothing substantive to arise from it.

Lotharsson,
do you agree with Vince that BEST confirms MBH98 and the Hockey Stick?.
Bill,
If you have outlined the issue of timeframes in your rather vague question re MBH98, does that mean you agree or disagree with Vince re BEST and MBH98?.

“Heck, even McIntyre himself, a key player in the events in question, when writing in this article quietly corrects Mann’s quote when he quotes from the WSJ!”

Really? Here’s McIntyre:

Dr. Mann refuses to release [the source code]. “Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in,” he says.

And here’s the original:

Mr. McIntyre thinks there are more errors but says his audit is limited because he still doesn’t know the exact computer code Dr. Mann used to generate the graph. Dr. Mann refuses to release it. “Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in,” he says.

The quote appears to be unchanged. McIntyre didn’t “correct” a word of it, did he?

The quote appears to be unchanged. McIntyre didn’t “correct” a word of it, did he?

My mistake. I was looking at the clarification that he was talking about the source code, and the fact that the entire McIntyre article is written in terms of “source code”, not algorithm. In other words, McIntyre does at least interpret the journalist’s quote as applying to the source code which is at least consistent with your conflation of “source code” with “algorithm” – and consistent with Mann’s belief that he was misquoted by the journalist after talking to him about the source code.

Now, you have several mistakes to acknowledge – the assertion that the paper doesn’t specify the algorithm, the assertion (IIRC) that no-one else could implement the algorithm without the source code, the assertion that the source code is the specification of the algorithm, the assertion that Mann’s methodology is responsible for the hockey stick shape of MBH98, … Bet you don’t acknowledge any of them.

And then there is the question of the citations for your preferred estimate of ECS…

“My mistake. I was looking at the clarification that he was talking about the source code, “

The “clarification” was nothing more than a replacement of the pronoun “it” by the noun it signified.

Original:

Mr. McIntyre thinks there are more errors but says his audit is limited because he still doesn’t know the exact computer code Dr. Mann used to generate the graph. Dr. Mann refuses to release it. “Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in,” he says.

ClimateAudit excerpt:

Dr. Mann refuses to release [the source code]. “Giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics that these people are engaged in,” he says.

“and the fact that the entire McIntyre article is written in terms of “source code”, not algorithm. In other words, McIntyre does at least interpret the journalist’s quote as applying to the source code which is at least consistent with your conflation of “source code” with “algorithm”“

Now, you have several mistakes to acknowledge – the assertion that the paper doesn’t specify the algorithm, the assertion (IIRC) that no-one else could implement the algorithm without the source code, the assertion that the source code is the specification of the algorithm, the assertion that Mann’s methodology is responsible for the hockey stick shape of MBH98, … Bet you don’t acknowledge any of them.

BBD says the argument for his estimate is “exhaustively documented in the literature”, which any philosophy student with basic English parsing skills could tell you is a very different claim to “is the best inference from all the evidence”,

It uses different words, but please demonstrate how they have a different meaning entirely.

if Mann’s algorithm is given in the original paper, then please explain why Mann was saying, 7 years after it was published, that “giving them the algorithm would be giving in to the intimidation tactics these people are engaged in?”

You know, Wow, I’ve long had a rather vague but persistent notion that there’s something unsettling–unhealthy even–about your obsessional, groupie-like fixation on a known weirdo who sports the improbable surname “Mann.”

But bill’s comment, up-thread there, about Latimer and bill callin’ him “Larch” and all, helped me to finally put my finger on what it is that’s been puzzling me about you, Wow.

In particular, Wow, I suddenly realized the disturbing fact that your chosen moniker, “Wow”, is just “Mom” rotated 180 degrees!

And so, it’s suddenly dawned on me that your last Michael “MANN” comment was really nothing more than a desperate, really creepy plea for help!

We were wrong, you know; ‘mike’s’ position on the LoSA scale is more like 20!

Just when we all thought that psychoanalysis was completely discredited, and the only half-way accurate thing Freud ever said is that you should certainly forgive your enemies (after they have been hanged), along comes mike in his scary drag role as Norman Bates’ momma…

Nah, Wow, Brad’s not rejecting things left, right and centre! He’s merely espousing private semantics. The key word in his quote is “unsupported”. Brad likes to think his position is “supported”, which does not seem to match the usage of the word by scientists. I expect that – should Brad deign to clarify – under Brad’s definition of “supported”, it simply does not matter that recent warming appears to be rather too strong for his preferred range of values. In other words, “supported” can include “strongly rebutted by evidence” as long as Brad can point to some scientist somewhere (Lindzen, anyone?) who once claimed ECS was rather low.

Can you describe your understanding of the difference between transient climate sensitivity and equilibrium climate sensitivity?

Once you’ve done that, can you explain what the current observed warming since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, compared with the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration over the same period, implies about equilibrium vs transient climate sensitivity? Reference to numbers, forcings, feedings-back, and sundry empirical studies would be interesting.

I’m keen to see if your climate physics is any better than your pH chemistry…

So why do you absolutely need Lotharsson’s answer so much that you can’t go on without it, yet not so much that you can justify looking for the answers between when you asked and now, which would only be a couple of pages to search through?

Because the front-runner for explaining this is the two-year-old tantrum thrower idea.

If you’re referring to pentaxZ there is no link to WUWT at the PNAS site.

I didn’t say there was.

The article in question was just touted on WUWT (via Bishop Hill), and the timing of pentaxZ’s (ahem) emissions generally suggest he that he gets his info from WUWT (and other denialosphere) articles and then cuts and pastes here. Lord knows he shows little sign of comprehending what he writes.

Wow, chameleon is just hoping to stir up controversy, perhaps to distract from Brad’s latest failures which may even be obvious to her – just like Brad manically posted a bunch of crap to try and distract from Latimer’s failures.

Either that, or – and this is quite plausible, given her history here – she can’t remember what she read a couple of days ago. She certainly shows no sign of any ability to research simple questions, and she is still on record as denying what she herself wrote a few days before she denied writing it.

Mind you, there’s nothing stopping both of the above hypotheses being true.

”Now, you have several mistakes to acknowledge – the assertion that the paper doesn’t specify the algorithm,”

Are these statements in the WSJ article correct?

Dr. Mann offered a strong rebuttal of the Canadians’ 2003 journal article, explaining that it didn’t correctly apply his techniques. In doing so, however, he revealed details of his data and mathematical methods that hadn’t appeared in his original paper.

When Messrs. McIntyre and McKitrick pointed this out to Nature, the journal that first published the hockey-stick graph, Dr. Mann and his two co-authors had to publish a partial correction. In it, they acknowledged one wrong date and the use of some tree-ring data that hadn’t been cited in the original paper, and they offered some new details of the statistical methods.

If so, then Mann failed to specify (among other things) the algorithm in the original paper.

I would say PNAS have a slightly heavier impact than the activist sites.

Only if the paper stands up to post-publication scrutiny. At first glance it seems likely to suffer from some of the fatal flaws of some of the papers that were widely celebrated by the denialosphere before the responses started to roll in.

If so, then Mann failed to specify (among other things) the algorithm in the original paper.

Even “if so”, your claim does not follow. The text you quoted does not demonstrate that the algorithm was not published – no matter how many times you repeat the claim. Furthermore, as previously pointed out repeatedly, Zorita’s independent replication demonstrates that the paper’s description was sufficient for a competent researcher – just not for M&M, who have demonstrated quite a lot of incompetence over the years (including horrendously screwing up their attempted “correction” of Mann’s original method).

I note – again – that you are arguing about what’s in the paper from someone else saying things about the paper, instead of demonstrating that the paper does not contain the algorithm. This is almost as low on the credibility stakes as pentaxZ cutting and pasting from WUWT. Maybe ignoring primary evidence in favour of sophistically parsing secondary comments about the evidence passes for thinking in a philosophy degree, but it’s showing you up as a poor critical thinker and unreliable claimant here.

But hey, as long as you keep getting attention, even disapprobation, it’s all good, right?

Could the audience of Phil Jones’ WMO presentation see it? You know, the people who saw the graph Phil Jones was referring to in the “Hide the Decline” email? Could they see the divergence problem when he put up the slide in question?

(also note that the term used was “hide”: future tense. Just like Ballmer’s “I’m gonna fucking kill Google”)

…and the evidence either FOR “ECS is probably less than 1.5 C” or against “ECS is most likely between 2.5 and 3.0 C”…

…and Wow’s question at #40?

…and Bernard’s questions at #54?

Oh, who am I kidding? Brad’s not going to seriously answer any serious questions let alone acknowledge errors! The latter would immediately belie his personal assessment of the awesomeness of his own intellect, and the former would expose him to the same danger!

[And damnit, looks like the comment numbering here for old comments here can change if another comment was held up in moderation ]

Speaking of both MBH and the WMO graph, it’s rather interesting that Brad spends far more energy on textual analysis of comments about a work than on any analysis of the work itself. (And he’s not the only one.)

Why, it’s almost like he’s taking more of a humanities approach to “analysing” scientific claims than a science approach…and even there doing it rather haphazardly by analysing secondary sources rather than primary ones…

So, brad, given that your assertion as to what was hidden is absolutely false (it’s in the paper referred to in the graph, as is common when synthesising the results of many papers: you don’t cut and paste the entire contents of all the papers you’re referring to), what is hidden?

So, brad, given that your assertion as to what was hidden is absolutely false (it’s in the paper referred to in the graph, as is common when synthesising the results of many papers: you don’t cut and paste the entire contents of all the papers you’re referring to),

No, but if you say such-and-such a curve comes from such-and-such a source, you can’t quietly chop and change the curve (in order, say, to hide the bits you don’t like). That’s essentially like attributing a mangled quote to someone. Where I come from it’s called “verballing.”

Yes you can. It’s entirely accepted. You use the data where it is valid and don’t use invalid data.

How do you know where the data is “valid” and where it’s “invalid”?

You haven’t thought this through too well, have you?

LOL

Next time you meet a scientist, ask them what they think about your nu ethics. (Hint: as Jonathan Jones, Richard Muller and Paul Dennis have pointed out, the kind of manipulation you’re defending is unforgivable in science.)